News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Goodbye Mac App Store by geofft on Friday March 10, 2017 @09:41PM (#13843880)
But what is "something"? Is saying "yes, you can modify google.com" permission to modify news.ycombinator.com too? If so, then you're giving every extension permission to mess with every website, which defeats the point of a permission scheme. If no, HTTPS Everywhere is prompting on each new website, which is unbearable.
Re:Goodbye Mac App Store by function_seven on Friday March 10, 2017 @09:49PM (#13843903)
It doesn’t defeat it. I expect a browser extension—whose job it is to rewrite URLs—to be able to rewrite URLs. But I don’t expect HTTPS Everywhere to want access to my camera, or to my filesystem, or to the microphone. So I allow the first one, and get very worried if I’m ever even asked about any of the others.

Another browser extension might want to automatically save images I come across to a directory. That one would prompt for access to my Documents folder. It wouldn’t request URL rewrite privileges, or camera, etc.

EDIT: So to answer your question, what is “something”? In this case, that would be: “HTTPS Everywhere wants to be able to edit the web addresses you visit”. Or something like that.

Re:Goodbye Mac App Store by cortesoft on Saturday March 11, 2017 @12:18AM (#13844355)
Something like "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit."

It can't just be the web addresses you visit, since it needs to change embedded tags inside the page to request https urls.